Far from the Shallow Now

[SPECIAL NOTE: Reminder -- our final video presentation night will be Monday, February 17th at 7pm in Galileo 201 on the Saint Mary's campus.  Please join us if you can.  We will be happy to be together again and we would love to show you what we've learned.  We will try to livestream for those who are out of range . . .]

We're winding up our time in the state of Pará.  We are strangely comfortable here and keep remarking about how familiar everything seems/feels, even in the city, where we only spent a few days on the front end of our trip.

Shawny and Jesse got together with community partners from years gone by all the way back to 2009 last night, and some of them also came for breakfast this morning. So we got a chance to see Ingrid, Ailson, and Odila from this trip and we also had a visit from Jaime, who worked with the 2009 and 2010 groups here in Santarém (though, unbeknownst to us, he was born in Anã and his mother -- Odila's sister -- still lives there).  Monica, who had traveled with the groups in 2014 and 2015 also joined us, and as a result of reconnecting with the folks from Anã, might rejoin the tourism group now.  Yay!

We hustled out in the late morning to make some important purchases: machetes!  We had to search for them in a few places, especially because some of us wanted little leather sleeves to hold them too. We found everything we had in mind.  We also got hooks for our beloved hammocks, so be ready for us to be drilling holes in places that you hadn't previously considered "hammock-friendly."

Speaking of hammocks, we got more of those too.  And we had limited success in our quest for Brasil soccer jerseys, though we might find those in Manaus if we didn't find our sizes here.  We mostly find that we don't care that much about traditional souvenirs, which we take to be a good sign that we did things in the way we intended to do them here.

We decided to gorge on some of our favorite local foods, including Louro's fried chicken, local ice cream (again), and açaí.  On our ice cream stop, we found one that was the flavor of creamed corn, along with some new local fruits that we hadn't tried before. We ate a lot of ice cream, then made another stop for bowls of pure açaí.  Louro had made some fabulous local fish for dinner, but we weren't very good eaters when it came to actual meal time. Oops.

On the way home, the song from "A Star is Born" called "Shallow" came on the radio in the van and for some reason we all just paused and sang at the top of our lungs.  Not all of the lyrics apply perfectly to us, but a lot of them are spot on.  Maybe that's "our song."

Tonight we are doing some photo and video work before our driver picks us up at midnight for our 4am flight.  Our things are spread everywhere, but if recent experience tells us anything, when the time comes, we will be neatly packed up and ready to roll just on time.

We will see some sights in Manaus so maybe we will post some pics then.  Or maybe not. But either way, we will be back in California on Thursday, where we will hole up in a computer lab for a few days to finish our final projects.  We'll see you later in the weekend (perhaps for the Super Bowl?).

Again, our dirty laundry STINKS!  And we have forgotten how to worry about our hair or what our feet look like (because they are always covered in dust, sand, or dirt).  We are maybe a bit tougher than we were when we left, but we are also full of more love than we thought possible, both for each other and for the "strangers" we met far away, for whom we now have deep affection that we imagine will last a lifetime.  We're glad you could join us through this blog (and our all-too-infrequent phone calls) and we hope you got some hints of what a wonderful experience we have had.  We look forward to seeing you soon!

Back in Santarem we went souvenir shopping so that we all could have our own machetes to take home.

Jaron is enjoying Louro’s famous frango frito (fried chicken).

 Ice cream, the perfect Brazilian delicacy on a pouring day.

The beautiful Miss Jennifer “Boo” Laird enjoys authentic açaí loaded with sugar and tapioca.

The sign and açaí fruits in front of the açaí shop.

Lorena, Boo and Rylee in a braiding train before a long travel adventure

Downpour of rain while exploring Santarem.

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   Unha de Gato, used to make tea to cure a variety of aches, pains and illnesses
   
   
   
   
   
   
    Once our meal was finished at the steakhouse, we given these cards to show that we had paid and could then leave the restaurant.
   
   
   
   
   

We had great ice cream. Boo had milho verde (corn) and açaí.